This old footage from Midnight Special always amuses me because what the musicians are doing has nothing at all to do with the music. However, someone has edited in some other nice footage of her, and it’s also a high-quality copy of the audio.

I miss you, Donna. I’m doing what I’m doing today in part because of what you did back in 1977. Thank you.

Yes, I haven’t posted more photos yet. Sorry about that; I’m going to try to set aside a chunk of time this weekend to work on it. My plan is to put together sets organized by topic, rather than by day (as I’ve done in the past), e.g. trains, buildings, landscapes, etc.

It was, as always, a good trip. The sakura have been beautiful for the last few days–which is somewhat lucky, since for the first time we arrived in, and left, Tokyo before they opened. We spent a chunk of yesterday evening hanging out on one of the platforms in the train station, watching the shinkansen go too and fro. I took some photos specifically intended to measure the velocities of the trains as they left; we’ll see how that works out once I’m able to put them into Photoshop and make some measurements. I have a number of photos of more general interest which I’ll post in the near future.

To me, however, the important thing about Uji is tea. Most(? all?) of the best tea producers in Japan are located in or near Uji. Uji is to tea as Congac is to brandy: it’s not the only place it’s made, but the best stuff is made there. It’s a short train ride from Kyoto Station, so we decided to visit it and look around a bit. It’s next to a river and the cherry blossoms were blooming gloriously.

(I’m just sticking in a couple of pictures quickly here; I’ll post more/better ones eventually, probably after we return.)

It turned out to be pretty much as I pictured, based on what little I knew about it and what I’ve seen in other Japanese towns. There’s a narrow street lined with shops selling tea and tea sweets, and a few places selling tea cups and so forth. We also found a shop with the largest and best selection of tenugui we’ve seen. We bought several of those, a tea bowl (for matcha) and a couple of cups, and several packages of tea and tea-flavored cookies. I deliberately didn’t get carried away with the tea purchase because I’ve found that how one brews good Japanese tea has almost as much to do with the quality and character of the end result as the tea itself, and I knew that we were going to buy tea at the Fukujuen shop in Kyoto Station–products with which I am already familiar. Still, it seemed silly to go to Uji and not buy any tea, so buy tea we did.

The Byodoin temple shares certain attributes with the other World Heritage site we’ve visited, the castle at Himeji. It’s a beautiful, unusual building which certainly merits preservation, and there are far too many tourists around it. It’s not surprising, I guess, but it’s still dismaying.

We had a good time in Uji, and since it’s just a short train ride from Kyoto, we’ll visit it again.

We walked from the Yasaka Shrine to Kyo-Mizu Temple today. This is one of our now-traditional activities while in Japan. This time it was cold but we had a fine time nonetheless. The cherry blossoms are in abundance now and the weather was clear, so it was a lovely day for a walk.

Here’s the silly video. It’s another fake-miniature/timelapse movie of traffic, this time shot from the window of our hotel in Kyoto:

Time for bed. Tomorrow we’re visiting a temple near the hotel, and then heading for the shopping district centered on Teramachi Street.

We had dinner at the Makinos’ house last night. Takako stuffed me with an abundance of her gyoza (dipped in a mixture of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and hot oil), spring rolls, a seafood-and-asparagus salad, and a dish with Chinese noodles, several kinds of fish, and what I think was either seaweed or mushrooms. At her insistence I also had a brief lesson in gyoza assembly and cooking.

Sid has finally retired from his work as both a guide for foreign visitors and an instructor for new guides. After 10 years in the guide business (preceeded by a lengthy career as an executive with Matsushita/Panasonic), he’s decided that he’s ready to take things a bit slower and turn his attention to studying Japanese history. Sid’s enthusiasm for showing visitors around his country is warm and infectious, and his departure will be a loss for the tour-guide community. On the other hand, I can completely understand how one would eventually grow weary of leading gaijin from one destination to the next. We are very fortunate to be befriended by him and Takako, in part because he continues to suggest interesting places for us to visit in Japan.

Tomorrow morning we head to Kyoto by shinkansen.

Japan got hit by a tropical storm yesterday. I say “Japan” as in “the whole country” because the storm did pretty much go right across most of the country. Kobe itself made national news because it received over 50mm of rain between 1:30 and 2:30PM. We were out in the shopping district for most of the day, but fortunately we were in one of the covered streets during the worst of the storm. We read in the paper today that there were a few injuries–mostly folks being blown right off their feet. Sadly, an elderly man was crushed to death when a warehouse next to his home collapsed. We’re fine, of course, but the walk back to the hotel was very windy.

We spent most of yesterday in those covered shopping streets. The sheer number and density of retail stores in shopping districts in Japan is somewhat staggering. Tracie ended up with several new blouses in various shades of a peach color that seems to be popular this season but I managed to avoid temptation altogether, despite lingering at the watch counters of one of the department stores.

Here are a few snapshots of the shopping area. I’ve got a few photos from Ginza that I need to post also but I’m not sure when I’ll get to those. I am, after all, on vacation.

Here’s a snapshot of the view from our room, taken last night:

I’ll try to post some more photos tonight, along with some observations about how knowing a little bit of a foreign language is at least as confusing as knowing none at all.